How to use Excel’s what-if tools to analyze business scenarios (free PDF)

Excel offers three what-if analysis tools that can sharpen your decision-making and help you find the best route to accomplish your objectives. This ebook introduces these tools—Goal Seek, Scenario Manager, and Data Tables—and demonstrates how you can put them to work. Sample files are included in the download.

From the ebook:

Excel’s what-if analysis tools are underused. When readers ask me for help accomplishing a certain task, I often respond with “Have you tried a data table?” Invariably, they don’t know how to implement the feature—sometimes, they don’t even know what a data table is. So in this guide, I’ll introduce you to Excel’s what-if analysis tools:

Goal Seek

Scenario Manager

Data Table

We’ll review the options, discuss when to use them, and then implement all three tools. The examples will be simple, but they will include enough information so you can start using these features on your own.

What’s a what-if tool?
What-if tools show you the impact of making a change without affecting the actual data. We'll start by exploring Goal Seek. This tool tells you how variables must change to achieve a specific goal.